This begins a series of articles on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Marketing best practices as we’re heading into the last quarter of 2010. The basics always remain the same: high quality, relevant content that addresses the needs of your target audience. Trends however change with the seasons as new technology emerges, with the “going green” movement, and with the increasing reliance on rapid fire one way and two way communication online.

Trophy Keywords: Woo the search engines and influence prospective customers. Keywords, keyword phrases, search terms, search term phrases. Whatever you would like to call them, these are the words that you put into a search engine when you are looking for something online.

Previous years may have held different advice however now in order to best woo the search engines and influence prospective customers (basically be the most effective on the search engines) you should focus on 1 trophy keyword per page. No, I don’t mean 1 keyword per page; I mean 1 trophy keyword.

Well, what’s a trophy word? It is that one powerful phrase that you have determined from research will bring the right prospective visitors to your website. The right prospective website visitors are the ones who are searching for what you have to offer, and if you are seeking customers, are most likely to be your prospective customers.

Let’s say you are searching online for how remove a red punch stain from your carpet. You are looking for tips and perhaps cleaners. You might put any of the following into Google (or Bing or Yahoo or any other search engine). “How do I remove red punch stain from carpet”, “cleaner to remove red punch stain”, “carpet stain remover”. I’m sure there might be others you might think of.

Now let’s say you are a website owner (or a blogger, or an article writer). You are going to make a list of all the possible phrases you could think of that someone might use to find that incredible information or product you have to offer. Then one by one you are going to put them into a search engine and see what results currently come up in the natural (organic) listings. Those are the listings that are truly relevant to what someone searching for; the result of search engine optimization techniques. You want to ignore any links that say sponsored link at the very top often in a shaded box (with the word sponsored link in tiny print) and any links off to the side. You are going to take note of how many results in all come up, then take a look at the first 20 listings and take note of specifically what kinds of listings come up; whether they are company websites, blogs, how to articles, shopping portal websites or directories. You are looking for the phrases that bring up the most responses that closely match what product or service you are actually trying to market. Do this over and over until you have a list of several high profile, relevant phrases, or trophy keywords.

Google remains the top used search engine so that is the search engine of choice to use in compiling your research results. In December 2009, Google had 85.35% of the search engine market. Their organic results are highly relevant because of Google’s sophisticated ranking algorithm.

Now, back to your website; look at one page. Take one of the search terms you have determined is a trophy keyword and mold your page around that one thought. Your title and description meta tags and all the page text should surround that one trophy keyword. If you find that you have a lot to say which flows into other potential trophy keyword, move that on to another website page that focuses solely on that phrase. For a blog, same concept; one post = one trophy keyword. A Facebook page post is same concept. An article is also the same concept.

Through this process of Internet marketing through trophy keywords, gradually you will find your material repeatedly coming up in the natural (organic) search engine results. That is the crucial 1st step to holding the trophy.

Author Bio: Diane Greenblatt is the founder and CEO of Our Online World, a Long Island, NY Internet Marketing company providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Marketing solutions. Please contact us and let’s discuss your online marketing needs.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: keywords,search terms,search engine optimization, seo, social media marketing, internet marketing